Monday, 25 February 2013

Black Planet

Right, let's get this over with:

Video number 1:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/y7fdu

Human world views and attitudes seem to suggest that we're an arrogant species. For instance, the Abrahamic tradition appears to view us as the pinnacle of creation, the apparently altruistic and selfless Jainism puts humans at the centre of the Universe and says only we can achieve enlightenment, even through non-violence, and humanism and rationalism make similar assumptions, such as the perfectibility of human nature or the accuracy of our reasoning. However, i would say that all of this means nothing because our apparent arrogance is like anthropomorphism in human form - we are judging ourselves as if we can be objective, whereas the human condition involves not being able to step outside our own perspective. Saying a human being is arrogant is a little like saying a peacock is proud, a monkey is cheeky or a sloth is lazy. They're not: these are stereotypes and we cannot meaningfully stereotype ourselves any more than we can attribute such characteristics to another species.

For a meaningful judgement to be made of what we are like as a species would involve another species able to make that judgement. We ourselves cannot see the wood for the trees and therefore we cannot claim to be either arrogant or humble.

Not much of a doobly-do on the second.
However, the view count on both of these is crap. I'm kind of wondering if i'm wasting my time, to be honest.

In other news, i've now verified my other channel. This may mean i receive a cheque from YouTube, ha ha. If i do, however, the plan is to make a video of me shredding it and upload it to YouTube because it'll probably get lots of views. In reality of course, that's a complete fantasy because i won't get one. I am, to be honest, seriously wondering if people really get paid by YouTube at all.

And, to this end, since nobody ever comments on this blog thank God, here's a comment i left on someone else's about this issue:

Sorry, comment got eaten!

What i was going to say was, i have two channels. One is six years old and has 70 000 views. I'm not surprised not to have received any money from that one. The other one, however, has almost half a million views and is around two years old. Both are long since verified, linked to Adsense, have not violated any intellectual property or other terms of service and so on - everything, so far as i can tell, has been done right. I have, however, not received any money for them. I am puzzled by this, but that wasn't the main point i was going to make.

My main point is that this needn't be a problem! On the strength of my channels, i have sold books, ebooks, given consultations and been able to tutor via Skype. In fact, i suspect that i've made a lot more money that way than i ever could've done via Adsense monetisation, and wanted to make the point that ads are not the only or even the best way of making money from YouTube.

Having said that, i am still, on an intellectual level, puzzled regarding why i haven't received any money from YouTube. I am thinking, though, that if i ever do get a cheque from them i may make a video of me shredding it so i can dramatically demonstrate that there are many other ways of deriving an income. In fact, the cheque might be worth more to me that way than its monetary value.